A plan to bridge the technology gap

By eSchool News

June 11th, 2008

Improving the equity between the well-off and less well-off students is one of the goals of a proposed technology plan for the Greenville, N.Y., Central School District, the Catskill Daily Mail reports. A key goal of the 20-page plan is "to assure that teachers, administrators, students, and families have equitable access to high-speed connectivity and up-to-date hardware and software," said technology director Scott Gardiner at the June 9 meeting of the school board. "Obviously, we’re not expecting the district to provide this right away, but we don’t even have a good handle on computer access across our district. This is a first step, to try to get a gauge on that. We know there’s disparity out there in the district; we know that some students don’t even have a computer, some have dial-up, some have high-speed internet. We don’t have a good handle on numbers, and we would like to try to get a more concrete detail on that." Gardiner described this goal as "kind of a new way of thinking about technology."